Werkzeugkiste

BODY BASED LEARNING

"Education is the only sure method which mankind possesses for directing his own course." (John Dewey, Introduction, in: F.M. Alexander, The Use of the Self, London: Orion Books 2001, p. 12 [first published: 1932])

"The best thing to do, then, is to learn from those who know how to live, and to do all we can to make the road to maturity for those who follow smoother and less treacherous." (Moshe Feldenkrais, The Potent Self: A Study of Compulsion and Spontaneity, Berkeley: Frog North Atlantic Books 1985, p. 240; last sentence of the book)

"As soon as people come with the idea of unlearning instead of learning, you have them in the frame of mind you want." (F.M. Alexander, Aphorisms, London: Mouritz 2000, p. 35)

"(...) the kinesthetic sense (...) is the sense which registers muscular tension within the body, and which tells us about the changes in muscular tension that accompany physical movement and variations in our mental state. (...) When this sense is debauched (...) two things happen. First, the individual develops a habit of using his psycho-physical instrument improperly. And, second, he loses his sense of what we may call muscular morality, his basic standard of physical right and wrong." (Aldous Huxley, The Education of an Amphibian, in: Aldous Huxley, Adonis and the Alphabet and Other Essays, London: Chatto&Windus 1956, p. 19)

"(...) the curriculum of our hypothetical course in what may be called the non-verbal humanities will include the following items. Training of the kinesthetic sense. Training of the special senses. Training of memory. Training in control of the autonomic nervous system. Training for spiritual insight." (Aldous Huxley, The Education of an Amphibian, in: Aldous Huxley, Adonis and the Alphabet and Other Essays, London: Chatto&Windus 1956, p. 19)

"The problem of incorporating a decent education in the non-verbal humanities into the current curriculum is a task for professional educators and administrators. What is needed at the present stage is research - intensive, extensive and long drawn research. Some Foundation with a few scores of millions to get rid of should finance a ten - or fifteen - year plan of observation and experiment." (Aldous Huxley, The Education of an Amphibian, in: Aldous Huxley, Adonis and the Alphabet and Other Essays, London: Chatto&Windus 1956, p. 38)

"Gradually develop a deeper, more realistic view of the body by considering its constitution - skin, blood, flesh, bone, and so forth." (Dalai Lama, How to Practice. The Way to a Meaningful Life, New York: Atria 2002, p. 41)

"The stupidity of letting children go wrong is that once they go wrong their right is wrong: therefore, the more they try to be right, the more they go wrong." (F.M. Alexander, Aphorisms. Illustrated by Birgit Meyer-Woycke, London: Mouritz 2000, p. 30)

"However, each of us has been given only one life and only one body. (...). In the long run, we can only function with consciousness of the truth. This also holds for our physical well-being."( Alice Miller, Breaking Down the Wall of Silence. To Join the Waiting Child, London: Virago 1997 [first edition: 1992], p. 133f)

"The aim of the psychiatrist is to teach the (statistically) abnormal to adjust themselves to the behavior patterns of a society composed of the (statistically) normal. The aim of the educator in spiritual insight is to teach the (statistically) normal that they are in fact insane and should do something about it." (Aldous Huxley, The Education of an Amphibian, in: Aldous Huxley, Adonis and the Alphabet and Other Essays, London: Chatto&Windus 1956, p. 33)

"Learning by doing is a sound principle if the doing is good doing. If it is bad doing (and in the vast majority of cases it is bad), learning by doing is hopelessly unsound." (Aldous Huxley, The Education of an Amphibian, in: Aldous Huxley, Adonis and the Alphabet and Other Essays, London: Chatto&Windus 1956, p. 21)

"The technique of Mr. Alexander gives to the educator a standard of psycho-physical health - in which what we call morality is included. (...). It provides therefore the conditions for the central direction of all special educational processes. It bears the same relation to education that education itself bears to all other human activities." (John Dewey, Introduction, in: F.M. Alexander, The Use of the Self, London: Orion Books 2001, p. 12 [first published: 1932])

CHALLENGE OF THE INTELLECTUAL TODAY

"So we can happily agree that scientists achieve objective truth in a way that litérateurs do not. But we explain this phenomenon sociologically rather than philosophically - by pointing out that natural scientists are organized into expert cultures in a way that literary intellectuals should not try to organize themselves. You can have an expert culture if you agree on what you want to get, but not if you are wondering what sort of life you ought to desire." (Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007, p. 101)

"The sort of person I am calling a 'literary intellectual' thinks that a life that is not lived close to the present limits of the human imagination is not worth living." (Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics, Philosophcial Papers: Vol. 4, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 200, p. 94)

"I have been told more than once that someone who was able to let his true self unfold during his childhood would become a martyr in our society because he would refuse to adapt to some of its norms. (...). Examples from history also appear to confirm it (...)." (Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware. Society's Betrayal of the Child, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1984, p. 97)

"I don't care what man you bring up, Socrates or anyone else: you will find gaps and holes in his thinking. Le me co-ordinate him and you will not find gaps and holes in his thinking." (F.M. Alexander, Aphorisms. Illustrated by Birgit Meyer-Woycke, London: Mouritz 2000, p. 16)

"The point is that 'intellecutality' as we understand it, can only be used when we are wrong within us." (F.M. Alexander, Aphorisms. Illustrated by Birgit Meyer-Woycke, London: Mouritz 2000, p. 18)

"To know when we are wrong is all that we shall ever know in this world." (F.M. Alexander, Aphorisms. Illustrated by Birgit Meyer-Woycke, London: Mouritz 2000, p. 33)

"You all want to know if you're right. When you get further on you will be right, but you won't know it, and you won't want to know if you're right." (F.M. Alexander, Aphorisms. Illustrated by Birgit Meyer-Woycke, London: Mouritz 2000, p. 32)

CLIMATE CHANGE

"In my search for genuinely effective answers to the climate crisis, I have held a series of "solutions summits" with engineers, scientists, and CEOs. In those discussions, one thing has become abundantly clear: when you connect the dots, it turns out that the real solutions to the climate crisis are the very same measures needed to renew our economy and escape the trap of ever-rising energy prices. Moreover, they are also the very same solutions we need to guarantee our national security without having to go to war in the Persian Gulf." (Al Gore, A Generational Challenge to Repower America, Talk given 17. July 2008)

"The very idea that climate change is a media invention --- is a media invention." (Mike Sandbothe, 13. February 2007, Svinkløv beach, Denmark)

"It requires no great effort to identify the apocalyptic features of our century: world wars, massacres, the specter of nuclear war, the enslavement of millions by technology and totalitarian regimes, the threat to the earth's ecological balance, the depletion of energy sources, the increase of drug addiction - the list could go on and on." (Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware. Society's Betrayal of the Child, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1984, p. 99)

"Those of us who have no expertise in the scientific aspects of assessing climate change and its causes can scarcely disregard the views held by the overwhelming majority of those who do possess that expertise. They could be wrong - the great majority of scientists sometimes are - but in view of what is at stake, to rely on that possibility would be a risky strategy." (Peter Singer, One World. The Ethics of Globalization, Yale University Press 2004 [first edition: 2002], p. 16)

"If the developed nations had had, during the past century, per capita emissions at the level of the developing nations, we would not today be facing a problem of climate change caused by human activity (...). So, to put it in terms a child could understand, as far as the atmosphere is concerned, the developed nations broke it. If we believe that people should contribute to fixing something in proportion to their responsibility for breaking it, then the developed nations owe it to the rest of the world to fix the problem with the atmosphere." (Peter Singer, One World. The Ethics of Globalization, Yale University Press 2004 [first edition: 2002], p. 33f)

"Despite the intuition that something drastic needs to be done about such a costly problem, economic analyses clearly show that it will be far more expensive to cut carbon-dioxide emissions radically than to pay the costs of adaption to the increased temperatures." (Bjørn Lomborg, The Truth about the Environment, in: The Economist, 2. August 2001)

"They prevent the very ideals in which they say they believe from materializing by the principles on which they work." (F.M. Alexander, Aphorisms. Illustrated by Birgit Meyer-Woycke, London: Mouritz 2000, p. 17)

"There is also an ethical issue about discounting the future. True, our investments may increase in value over time, and we will become richer, but the price we are prepared to pay to save human lives, or endangered species, may go up just as much. These values are not consumer goods, like TVs or dishwashers, which drop in value in proportion to our earnings. They are things like health, something that the richer we get, the more we are willing to spend to preserve." (Peter Singer, One World. The Ethics of Globalization, Yale University Press 2004 [first edition: 2002], p. 25f)

"In the frenzy of modern life we lose sight of the real value of humanity: People become the sum total of what they produce. Human beings act like machines whose function is to make money." (Dalai Lama, How to Practice. The Way to a Meaningful Life, New York: Atria 2002, p. 35)

"If you read the UN Climate panel reports it will get worse some places. Actually some places will get better like where I am from in Denmark." (Bjørn Lomborg on CNN, Exchange with Faeed Zakaria, 16. June 2008)

"(...) what counts as an accurate report of experience is a matter of what a community will let you get away with." (Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics. Philosophical Papers, Vol. 4, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007, p. 11)

"Suppose you engage as a philosopher with perhaps the biggest collective challenge of the 21st century, the climate change - by launching your brilliance in order to analyze your fellow-philosophers' views of this-or-that conceptual aspect of the climate change. Chances are excellent that whatever you end up contributing to in that expert-cultural philosophical debate on climate change is not going to have any effect in the actual matter of climate change. Philosophers can create a never-ending debate about anything that can be named." (Esa Saarinen, "Kindness to Babies and Other Radical Ideas in Rorty's Anti-Cynical Philosophy, in: Pragmatismus als Kulturpolitik, ed. by Alexander Groeschner and Mike Sandbothe, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp 2009, in print)

"Everyone is always teaching one what to do, leaving us still doing the things we shouldn't do." (F.M. Alexander, Aphorisms. Illustrated by Birgit Meyer-Woycke, London: Mouritz 2000, p. 47)

"As soon as people come with the idea of unlearning instead of learning, you have them in the frame of mind you want." (F.M. Alexander, Aphorisms. Illustrated by Birgit Meyer-Woycke, London: Mouritz 2000, p. 35)

"A few years ago, it would not have been possible to issue such a challenge. But here's what's changed: the sharp cost reductions now beginning to take place in solar, wind, and geothermal power - coupled with the recent dramatic price increases for oil and coal - have radically changed the economics of energy." (Al Gore, A Generational Challenge to Repower America, Talk given 17. July 2008)

"To those who say 10 years is not enough time, I respectfully ask them to consider what the world's scientists are telling us about the risks we face if we don't act in 10 years. The leading experts predict that we have less than 10 years to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose our ability to ever recover from this environmental crisis. When the use of oil and coal goes up, pollution goes up. When the use of solar, wind and geothermal increases, pollution comes down." (Al Gore, A Generational Challenge to Repower America, Talk given 17. July 2008)

CRISIS OF WORLD ECONOMY

"Money makes the world stand still." (Mike Sandbothe regarding the crisis of world economy 2008/9; Helsinki August 2007)

"Now wars and disaster responses are so fully privatized that they are themselves the new market; there is no need to wait until after the war for the boom - the medium is the message." (Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, New York: Holt 2007, p. 13)

"The bottom line is that while Friedman's economic model is capable of being partially imposed under democracy, authoritarian conditions are required for the implementation of its true vision." (Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, New York: Holt 2007, p. 11)

"To be blind to the facts about human nature is to risk disaster." (Peter Singer, A Darwinian Left. Politics, Evolution and Cooperation, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2000, p. 38)

"(...) to show why we need enemies, why we feel depressed when enemies disappear, and what this has to do with our periodic need for wars and economic crises whose purpose is to reduce our anxieties about success and prosperity." (Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, New York/London: Karnac 2002, Online-Edition: Preface, No. 8)

"(...) I am very conscious of the principle of diminishing marginal utility, which tells us that while a given sum of money, say £100, makes a very little difference to the utility of someone who already has a lot, it may make a huge difference to the utility of someone who has very little. In a world in which the 400 richest people have a combined net worth greater than the bottom 45 per cent of the world's population - about 2.3 billion - and over a billion people live on less than US$1 per day, that principle provides enough grounds for urging us to work towards a more equal distribution of resources." (Peter Singer, A Darwinian Left. Politics, Evolution and Cooperation, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2000, p. 9)

"The means employed by the lust for power have changed, but the same volcano continues to glow, the impatience and the immoderate love demand their sacrifice: and what one formerly did 'for the sake of God' one now does for the sake of money, that is to say, for the sake of that which now gives the highest feeling of power and good conscience." (Friedrich Nietzsche, The dawn: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, 204 [German original first published 1881])

"Both national and international surveys show little correlation between an increase in wealth and an increase in happiness, once basic needs have been met." (Peter Singer, A Darwinian Left. Politics, Evolution and Cooperation, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2000, p. 45)

"Harmony cannot thrive in a climate of mistrust, cheating, bullying and mean-spirited competition." (Dalai Lama, How to Practice. The Way to a Meaningful Life, New York: Atria 2002, p. 11)

"Properly understood, self-interest is broader than economic self-interest. Most people want their lives to be happy, fulfilling, or meaningful in some way, and they recognise that money is, at best, a means to achieving part of these ends. Public policy does not have to rely on self-interest in this narrow economic sense. It can, instead, appeal to the widespread need to feel wanted, or useful, or to belong to a community - all things that are more likely to come from cooperating with others than from competing with them." (Peter Singer, A Darwinian Left. Politics, Evolution and Cooperation, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2000, p. 42)

CULTURAL POLITICS

"The more philosophy interacts with other human activities - not just natural science, but art, literature, religion and politics as well - the more relevant to cultural politics it becomes, and thus the more useful. The more it strives for autonomy, the less attention it deserves." (Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics. Philosophical Papers, Vol. 4, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007, p. X)

"I want to argue that cultural politics should replace ontology, and also that whether it should or not is itself a matter of cultural politics." (Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics. Philosophical Papers, Vol. 4, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007, p. 5)

"In the unsuspecting, trusting attitude of Kafka's convicted prisoner [in his novel 'Penal Colony' - M.S.] (...) we can see the students of today who are so eager to believe that the only thing that counts in their four years of study is their academic performance and that human commitment is not required." [alternative translation suggested by M.S.: "(...) who are so eager to believe that the only thing that they have to give away is their efforts and not their very substance." (Alice Miller, For Your Own Good. The Roots of Violence in Child-rearing, London: Virago 1987, p. 98)

About studying Psychology at universities: "When we consider how much time and energy is devoted during these best years to wasting the last opportunities of adolescence and to suppressing, by means of the intellectual disciplines, the feelings that emerge with particular force at this age, then it is no wonder that the people who have made this sacrifice victimize their patients and clients in turn, treating them as mere objects of knowledge instead of as autonomous, creative beings." [Alternative translation for "by means of the intellectual disciplines" suggested by M.S.: "by means of scientific reason"] (Alice Miller, For Your Own Good. The Roots of Violence in Child-rearing, London: Virago 1987, p. 279)

"(...) the experience that each of us has had with decisions about curriculum and appointment should persuade us that the distinction between academic politics and the disinterested pursuit of truth is pretty fuzzy. But that fuzziness does not, and should not, make us treasure free and independent universities any less. Neither philosophers nor anyone else can offer us nice sharp distinctions between the appropriate social utility and inappropriate politicization. But we have accumulated a lot of experience about how to keep redrawing this line (...). One of the things this accumulated experience has taught us is that universities are unlikely to remain healthy and free once people outside the university take a hand in redrawing this line." (Richard Rorty, Does Academic Freedom have Philosophical Presuppositions?, in: The Future of Academic Freedom, ed. by Louis Menand, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press1996, p. 28)

"Should our pedagogical system become more relaxed someday, however, should the commandment 'Thou shalt not be aware of what was done to you as a child' lose its force, then our heretofore treasured 'products of culture' will no doubt decline in number - from unnessesary, useless dissertations all the way to the most famous philosophical treatises. But their place would be taken by many honest reports about what really happened to their authors." (Alice Miller, The Untouched Key. Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness, New York: Anchor 1991, p. 131)

"It is not the psychologists but the literary writers who are ahead of their time. (...). There has been a markes increase in the willingness of the postwar generation [of German literary writers - M.S.] to seek the truth of their childhood and in their ability to bear the truth once they have discovered it. (...). I see great hope in this as a step along the road to truth and at the same time as confirmation that even a minimal loosening up of child-rearing principles can bear fruit by enabling at least our writers to become aware. That the academic disciplines must lag behind is an unfortunate but well-known fact." (Alice Miller, For Your Own Good. The Roots of Violence in Child-rearing, London: Virago 1987, p. 279)

"As I demonstrated in The Drama of the Gifted Child, the career of a psychologist begins in childhood with the desperate attempt to understand the parents without judging them. We should not remain bogged down in the fears of our childhood. As adults we must summon up the courage to judge, to call evil by its name and not tolerate it." (Alice Miller, The Truth Will Set You Free. Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self, New York: Bacic 2001, p. 131)

"I doubt that philosophy is well suited to make an object of loyalty of the species, but I can vaguely imagine that someday the combined efforts of politicans, journalists, and novelists [artists! M.S.] might make a single global community out of us." (Richard Rorty, Cultural Otherness. Correspondence with Richard Rorty, ed. by Niyogi Balslev, Atlanta: Scholar Press 1999 [first edition 1991], p. 71)

"Kundera's utopia is carnevalesque, Dickensian, a crowd of eccentrics rejoicing in each other's idiosyncracies, curious for novelty rather nostalgic for primordiality. The bigger, more varied, and more boisterous the crowd the better." (Richard Rorty, Cultural Otherness. Correspondence with Richard Rorty, ed. by Niyogi Balslev, Atlanta: Scholar Press 1999 [first edition 1991], p. 114)

"Every existing language is an implied theory of man and the universe, a virtual philosophy." (Aldous Huxley, The Education of an Amphibian, in: Aldous Huxley, Adonis and the Alphabet and Other Essays, London: Chatto&Windus 1956, p. 10)

"The idea of universal obligation to respect human dignity gets replaced by the idea of loyalty to a very large group - the human species. The idea that moral obligation extends beyond that species to an even larger group becomes the idea of loyalty to all those who, like yourself, can experience pain - even the cows and the kangaroos - or perhaps even to all living things, even the trees." (Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007, p. 45).

"Each of us has a valid sense of self, of 'I'. We also share fundamental goals: We want happiness and do not want suffering. Animals and insects also want happiness and do not want suffering (...)." (Dalai Lama, How to Practice. The Way to a Meaningful Life, New York: Atria 2002, p. 4)

"Darwinian political thinkers should be more inclined to recognize, and base policies on, the similarities we identify between humans and nonhuman animals." (Peter Singer, A Darwinian Left. Politics, Evolution and Cooperation, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2000, p. 17)

"(...) while some areas of human life show great diversity, in others, human behaviour stays fairly constant across the whole range of human cultures, and some aspects of our behaviour are also shared with our closest nonhuman relatives." (Peter Singer, A Darwinian Left. Politics, Evolution and Cooperation, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2000, p. 34)

"Although there are grave signs of trouble between poorer and richer nations, and between poorer and richer groups within nations, these economic rifts can be healed by a stronger sense of global interdependence and responsibility. The people of one nation must consider the people of other nations to be like brothers and sisters who deserve progress for their homelands." (Dalai Lama, How to Practice. The Way to a Meaningful Life, New York: Atria 2002, p. 6f)

GERMAN TRANSLATION: "Of course, national leaders have a special responsibility (...), but every individual must also take the initiative (...). Just by being human, by seeking to gain happiness and avoid suffering, you are citizen of this planet." (Dalai Lama, How to Practice. The Way to a Meaningful Life, New York: Atria 2002, p. 10)

"There comes a time when we must fight again for what we know to be the truth. Here comes the day when we must rise again to save ourselves reclaim on you. People, let's get together and show our power all over the world! Everybody, everybody, everybody, now, come together, come together, come together now! (...). We know the truth lies in the simple things. (...). You are a volunteer not just a victim." (Jimmy Cliff & Tony Rebel, "People"; Johnny Clegg and Jimmy Cliff in the presence of Nelson Mandela, "People")

PHILOSOPHY OF THE EMOTIONAL BODY

"For the human soul is virtually indestructible, and its ability to rise from the ashes remains as long as the body draws breath." (Alice Miller, For Your Own Good. The Roots of Violence in Child-rearing, London: Virago 1987, p. 280)

"As a matter of fact, feeling is much more use than what they call 'mind' when it's right." (F.M. Alexander, Aphorisms. Illustrated by Birgit Meyer-Woycke, London: Mouritz 2000, p. 22)

"You are not making decisions: you are doing kinaesthetically what you feel to be right." (F.M. Alexander, Aphorisms. Illustrated by Birgit Meyer-Woycke, London: Mouritz 2000, p. 77)

"Today, I think, the important boundary lies not between those who were once mistreated and those who were not; rather, I see it as dividing unconscious victims from conscious survivors. Because most of us were victims of the 'educational' violence that is - unfortunately - still held in high esteem in too many parts of the world, the United States included. Today, human rights are denied only to children." (Alice Miller, Preface to the 2002 Edition: The Hidden Truth, in: For Your Own Good. Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing And the Roots of Violence, New York: Farrar/Straus/Giroux, 4. edition, 2002, p. XIV)

“The older we get, the more difficult it is to find other people who can give us the love our parents denied us. But the body’s expectations do not slacken with age (...). The only way out of this dilemma is to become aware of these mechanisms and to identify the reality of our own childhood by counteracting the processes of repression and denial. In this way we can create in our own selves a person who can satisfy at least some of the needs that have been waiting for fulfillment since birth, if not earlier. Then we can give ourselves the attention, the respect, the understanding for our emotions, the sorely needed protection, and the unconditional love that our parents withheld from us.” (Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies. The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting, New York and London: Norton 2006, p. 22)

"Love was undoubtedly one of the things capable of changing a person's life, from one moment to the next. But there was the other side of the coin, the second thing that could make a human being take a totally different course from the one he or she had planned; and that was called despair. Yes, perhaps love really could transform someone, but despair did the job more quickly." (Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes, London: HarperCollins 2003, p. 58)

"This book is a challenge to the central and most cherished claim in the official story - that the triumph of deregulated capitalism has been born of freedom, that unfettered free markets go hand in hand with democracy. Instead, I will show that this fundamentalist form of capitalism has consistently been midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion, inflicted on the collective body politic as well as on countless individual bodies." (Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, New York: Holt 2007, p. 18)

"Individuals who refuse to adapt to a totalitarian regime are not doing so out of a sense of duty or because of naiveté but because they cannot help but be true to themselves. The longer I wrestle with these questions, the more I am inclined to see courage, integrity, and a capacity for love not as 'virtues', not as moral categories, but as the consequence of a benign fate." (Alice Miller, For Your Own Good. The Roots of Violence in Child-rearing, London: Virago 1987, p. 84f)

"What was considered good yesterday can (...) be considered evil and corrupt today, and vice versa. But those who have spontaneous feelings can only be themselves. They have no other choice if they want to remain true to themselves. Rejection, ostracism, loss of love, and name calling will not fail to affect them; they will suffer as a result and will dread them, but once they have found their authentic self they will not want to lose it. And when they sense that something is being demanded of them to which their whole being says no, they cannot do it. They simply cannot." (Alice Miller, For Your Own Good. The Roots of Violence in Child-rearing, London: Virago 1987, p. 85)

"Children who are lectured to, learn how to lecture; if they are admonished, they learn how to admonish; if scolded, they learn how to scold; if ridiculed, they learn how to ridicule; if humiliated, they learn how to humiliate; if their psyche is killed, they will learn how to kill - the only question is who will be killed: oneself, others, or both." (Alice Miller, For Your Own Good. The Roots of Violence in Child-rearing, London: Virago 1987, p. 98)

"Children who are respected learn respect. Children who are cared for learn to care for those weaker than themselve. Children who are loved for what they are cannot learn intolerance." (Alice Miller, For Your Own Good. The Roots of Violence in Child-rearing, London: Vrargo 1987, p. 97)

"How might it be that anything matters more than kindness to babies? One possibility is to hold representations to be more significant, more worthy of attention, than what they stand for. Instead of hugging a baby, say, you end up contemplating the concept of 'a baby' or 'a hug'. You might have the overall view that as a prerequisite to being kind to babies, we will have to get clear on the concept of 'kindness' and 'babies', perhaps even of 'interaction' or 'bodily encounter' or the problem of 'other minds', an effort that is likely to take some time. (...). Is such an outcome not somewhat perverse? Yet this is what the philosophy departments everywhere de facto generate. Kindness to babies just is not up on the list of what is considered relevant." (Esa Saarinen, "Kindness to Babies and Other Radical Ideas in Rorty's Anti-Cynical Philosophy", in: Pragmatismus als Kulturpolitik, ed. by Alexander Groeschner and Mike Sandbothe, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp 2009, in print).

"I would call any philosophy and any way of thinking that does not assign first priority to kindness to babies, as cynical. (...). Babies are the future, and kindness to babies is the care of the apotheosis of that future." (Esa Saarinen, "Kindness to Babies and Other Radical Ideas in Rorty's Anti-Cynical Philosophy", in: Pragmatismus als Kulturpolitik, ed. by Alexander Groeschner and Mike Sandbothe, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp 2009, in print).

"Many people agree with Marx that we should try to create a world in which human beings devote all their energies to increasing human happiness in this world than taking time off to think about the possibility of life after death." (Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics. Philosophical Papers, Vol. 4, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007, p. 4)

"Love and cruelty are mutually exclusive. No one ever slaps a child out of love but rather because in similar situations, when one was defenseless, one was slapped and then compelled to interpret it as a sign of love. This inner confusion prevailed for thirty or forty years and is passed on to one's own child. That's all." (Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge. Facing Childhood Injuries, New York: Anchor 1991, p. 33).

"If Nietzsche had not been forced to learn as a child that one must master an 'unbearable fit of sobbing', if he had simply been allowed to sob, then humanity would have been one philosopher poorer, but in return the life of a human being named Nietzsche would have been richer. And who knows what that vital Nietzsche would then have been able to give humanity?" (Alice Miller, The Untouched Key. Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness, New York: Anchor 1991, p. 133)

'The absence or presence of a helping witness in childhood determines whether a mistreated child will become a despot who turns his repressed feelings of helplessness against others or an artist who can tell about his or her suffering." (Alice Miller, The Untouched Key. Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness, New York: Anchor 1991, p. 60)

"Stalin's family was very poor, and his mother had to work. But Charlie Chaplin's mother was poor too. She even had to put her child in an orphanage, but she visited him there and gave him the assurance that he was loved, that he was valuable and important to someone. The experience of being loved can be sensed in all the Chaplin films." (Alice Miller, The Untouched Key. Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness, New York: Anchor 1991, p. 67)

"If parents are also able to give their child the same respect and tolerance they had for their own parents, they will surely be providing him with the best possible foundation for his entire life." (Alice Miller, For Your Own Good. The Roots of Violence in Child-rearing, London: Vrargo 1987, p. 132f)

"There would without any doubt be more people capable of love if the Church, instead of urging its members to obey authority and expecting allegiance to Christ on these grounds, would understand the crucial significance of Joseph's attitude. He served his child because he regarded Him as the child of God. What would it be like if all of us regarded our children as children of God - which we could do, after all?" (Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware. Society's Betrayal of the Child, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1984, p. 97)

"Destructiveness - the phenomenon that governs our world - is not our ineluctable fate. If we love and care for our children, it can be banished from the face of the earth." (Alice Miller, Breaking Down the Wall of Silence. To Join the Waiting Child, London: Virago 1997 [first edition: 1992], p. 90)

"Pragmatism puts natural science on all fours with politics and art. It is one more source of suggestions about what to do with our lives." (Richard Rorty, Dewey and Posner on Pragmatism and Moral Progress, in: University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 74, Summer 2007, p. 917)

"John Dewey once quoted G.K.Chesterton's remark that 'Pragmatism is a matter of human needs and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist.' Chesterton had a point, and Dewey granted it. Dewey was quite aware of what he called 'a supposed necessity of the 'human mind' to believe in certain absolute truths.' But he thought that this necessity had existed only in an earlier stage of human history, a stage which we might now move beyond." (Richard Rorty, Does Academic Freedom have Philosophical Presuppositions?, in: The Future of Academic Freedom, ed. by Louis Menand, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press1996, p. 33)

"(...) I realize that the key point of pragmatism was never a theory of pragmatism but the actual conduct of it. Herein, I would like to add, lies its radicalism." (Esa Saarinen, "Kindness to Babies and Other Radical Ideas in Rorty's Anti-Cynical Philosophy, in: Pragmatismus als Kulturpolitik, ed. by Alexander Groeschner and Mike Sandbothe, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp 2009, in print).

"Let us define the Philosopher’s Index of Self-Indulgence as the sum you get from a page of her writing as you add up

a) the number of times a word appears with ending “-ism” to it;b) the number of times some word is written with a capital letter although it should be written in a small letter;c) the number of words of an example that has been narrated in a way that your medical doctor daughter, architect son, engineer brother and retired aunt would find boring;d) the number of times any of the words “argument”, “distinction”, “theory”, “position” are mentioned." (Esa Saarinen, "Kindness to Babies and Other Radical Ideas in Rorty's Anti-Cynical Philosophy, in: Pragmatismus als Kulturpolitik, ed. by Alexander Groeschner and Mike Sandbothe, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp 2009, in print).

"So-called methods are simply descriptions of the activities engaged in by enthusiastic imitators of one or another original mind (...)." (Richard Rorty, Introduction, in: Truth and Progress. Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p.10)

"The difference between subjectivity and sound scholarship will now be glossed as that between the satisfaction of private, idiosyncratic, and perhaps secret needs and the satisfaction of needs which are widely shared, well publicized, and freely debated." (Richard Rorty, Does Academic Freedom have Philosophical Presuppositions?, in: The Future of Academic Freedom, ed. by Louis Menand, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press 1996, p. 38)

„Pragmatism occured in two waves. The first spanned the late nineteenth century to the Second World War. There then was a lapse of two generations until our time, in which the movement has revived and spread back to Europe. Its proponents now include Hans Joas in Germany, a school of young pragmatists in Denmark, and the Americans Richard Rorty, Richard Bernstein, and myself. Two world wars and the arc of the Soviet empire checked but did not extinguish the hope embodied in pragmatism; its animating impulse remains to engage with ordinary, plural, constructive human activities.“ (Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2008, p. 287)

"Even worse is the vulgarity with which a former Tour de France winner like Bjarne Riis commented on revelations that he was a doper: 'The yellow jersey is in a cardboard box in my garage. You can pick it up.' That sort of thing should never have been said. It's pure Danish nihilism. It's the way people talk when they've reached the ultimate in bad behavior." (Peter Sloterdijk, The Riders Are Just Regular Employees, in: Der Spiegel, 10. July 2008)

"This great cyclist of the past was a Nietzschean in the mountains, a man in the process of overcoming gravity and becoming a superman. Now this pseudo-superman is behaving as if he were the last man on earth, burping into every microphone. Even the symbol of his greatest success means less than nothing to him. It turns out that this higher dimension never existed for him. There was no sense of honor, no symbolic excess, no brilliance, no tension from above. The jersey was nothing but a meaningless rag. If you pull down the sport's dimension of honor, and its symbols, everything ends. Hearing such a filthy remark from the mouth of a rider who was once at the very top is an appalling experience." (Peter Sloterdijk, The Riders Are Just Regular Employees, in: Der Spiegel, 10. July 2008)

"I think that the fact, that Bjarne stepped forward and told about his past, only adds further to the traits, that he has as a human being. I don't think you can take anything away from him. He was a great cyclist, when he was active and now, as a director, he has been able to develop a team of winners. We have a good reason to be proud of that." (Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Prime Minister of Denmark, Anders Fogh Rasmussen: Bjarne is a hero, B.T., 24. July 2008)

"When Bjarne, through the press, informed [the public] about his doping it must have cost him a lot of resources and courage to step forward. It's very common, when a big pressure like that is removed from the mind and the body, there will first be a relief and afterwards all the emotions, that you have held back, are released." (Ole Kåre Føli, Therapist of Bjarne Riis since many years, B.T. 1. August 2008, p. 10)

"Riis' mother can still get nightmares by thinking back on that cold february day, when her only 2 year old son Michael (Bjarne was then only 1 year, ed.), in an unguarded moment, ran through a hole in the hedge, opened the gate to the neighbor's garden and fell through the thin ice of the pond in the garden. Some minutes later she found her child lifeless, floating with the head down. Desperately she tried to blow life into him by artificial ventilation. She successfully managed to get the little heart beating again, but the boy's brain was already seriously damaged. For 9 months he was laying unconscious in a hospital bed of Herning city hospital. Until Bodil Riis chose to turn off the respirator - with the silent accept of the doctors and nurses." (B.T. , How Bjarnes brother died, 1. August 2008)

"Only 3 years old Bjarne's mother disappeared out of his life. Not because she died, but because the family fell apart after the tragic accident. And having your mother turning her back to you, is according to experts, the worst thing a child can experience." B.T., A Child's Nightmare, 1. August 2008, p. 9)